How I built my tiny house for under $1,500 using nearly 100% repurposed materials while creating only 30 pounds of trash.

The tiny house movement has caught on like a wildfire over the last decade, and there’s a lot of positivity coming out if it. I’m very excited about tiny houses and see them as a very useful tool in working towards a more sustainable and just world. I lived in a 50 sq. ft. tiny house in San Diego in 2015-2016. I’ve produced videos about tiny houses to spread the movement through my social media. I’ve visited tiny houses around the United States and in a few countries, and I have even been to a tiny house festival. I’ve made friends with the creators of some of the biggest tiny house pages. Now, I’ve built my first tiny house. Needless to say, I really love tiny houses and am very excited about them. And I’ve become fairly knowledgeable on them.

I may not have a whole lot of money, but I’ve got a whole lot of pumpkins!
I am absolutely enamored by the power of the seed. Allow me to share this experience with you.
In January I had dinner with my friend Terry Meer. He made me pumpkin from his garden. This is not just a typical pumpkin you’d find at the grocery store though. This is the fantastic Seminole Pumpkin. I desperately wanted to grow it myself, so I scooped the seeds out of the three pumpkins we cut open, and I took the seeds home with me. In a few months when the time was right I planted them into my gardens.

This was my favorite moment of my foraging trip in South Florida.
We spotted a house with two coconut trees absolutely loaded with coconuts. I took an educated guess that they were not harvesting the trees, as a vast majority of trees are never harvested.
So we stopped the car and knocked on the front door. Sure enough I was right.
The trees had hundreds of fallen coconuts around them, likely a few year’s worth. They were very happy for us to harvest the trees, so we got right to it.

Rob Greenfield and IDEAS for Us have partnered to launch a micro-grant program to incubate new projects that will have a positive impact in the Orlando, Florida community both environmentally and socially. We are launching the program by offering three micro-grants of $1,000 this spring. Throughout the upcoming years more grants will be offered.

We simply want to make our community a happier, healthier and more sustainable place. We think that empowering our neighbors who have great ideas, but lack the funds to implement them, is one of the greatest ways that we can do this. With dedication and a little ingenuity we know that $1,000 can go a long way in launching a new initiative that can ultimately grow into something very impactful. Along with the micro-grant, the project will also receive advice from Rob Greenfield as well as promotion through social media through a network of over 10 million people.

(NOTE: For beginner gardeners that are not a part of the Free Seed Project, you are still in a good place. This guide is designed to help you start growing food and be successful at it).

Here at the Free Seed Project, we don’t want to just give out free seeds. We want to support you in becoming a successful gardener for yourself and your community.

In this article we have created a resource guide and FAQs to help you. This guide is geared largely toward beginner and first-time gardeners because well, experienced gardeners don’t need our help as much! Our goal with this guide is to get you started successfully and get you past the parts you may be nervous about. We want to empower you and activate you into growing your own food and sharing it with your community. And once your confidence level has risen and you feel like you’ve got the hang of it, we’re confident that you can figure out the rest!

So again, this guide focuses on the basics of growing food and provides a general rule of thumb with ideas. We believe we’ve covered mostly everything here to get you past the hard parts.

A community fruit tree is a publicly owned fruit tree that is easily accessible for anyone to pick from. A sign next to the tree invites people to enjoy the fruit. Each tree can be found on the online map below that is brought to you by our friends at fallingfruit.org. The Community Fruit Trees we have planted so far are located at residential front yards and businesses with access from a public sidewalk, the medians between streets and sidewalk, schools, public parks, churchyards, and along bike trails. We plant fruit trees where people walk every day and where they are highly accessible.

Using this map, you can find Community Fruit Trees near you. You can also use fallingfruit.org to find accessible fruit trees in your area.

50 million American are food insecure. This means that even with the US being one of the wealthiest nations on Earth, a staggering number of people simply don’t have enough to eat… And one of the hardest hit populations are single parents and their children.

None of us can change the world and none of us can end hunger alone, but we can change the world of a few people in our community and create a positive ripple from there. That’s why we’ve started Gardens for Single Moms.